Sobekhotep wrote:I guess the Manchus have no practical use for it. They're content to just use Chinese. Maybe if they had their own country...

That's a pretty big if, judging by how China treats the Tibetans. They're intent on maintaining their borders.

It just goes to show that the Manchu went from the ruling class to a small minority with an almost extinct language, whereas the Jews went from a persecuted minority to having their own country and reviving Hebrew. I guess it really depends who's in charge politically.

Modern Hebrew is basically like Esperanto. It's an artificial language, restored by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda אֱלִיעֶזֶר בֶּן־יְהוּדָה.Many words were completely invented by him, or he took existing words, like lightning for electricity. חַשְׁמַל khashmal (חשמל)He also made the grammar simpler and ditched the vowel signs. He designed it to be simpler than Ancient Hebrew.

I wouldn't call it that. What Ben-Yehuda did was prescribe a modernized form of the language with new vocabulary. His intention was to make Hebrew useable in daily life. I suppose by doing so he had to change its character, but fundamentally it is still the same language.

Many words were completely invented by him, or he took existing words, like lightning for electricity. חַשְׁמַל khashmal (חשמל)

Well, it's better to say he adapted them rather than invented them outright. חשמל is a good example, although it actually means something like "coronal discharge" (it's hard to translate). The word for lightning is ברק (bārāq).

He also made the grammar simpler and ditched the vowel signs. He designed it to be simpler than Ancient Hebrew.

He did indeed simplify the grammar but you can't say really he ditched the vowel signs because they weren't part of the orthography to begin with. The original spelling for Hebrew didn't write vowels. The vowel points were developed in the Middle Ages and are used only when precise reading is required, like in religious texts.

Talib wrote:That's a pretty big if, judging by how China treats the Tibetans. They're intent on maintaining their borders.

It just goes to show that the Manchu went from the ruling class to a small minority with an almost extinct language, whereas the Jews went from a persecuted minority to having their own country and reviving Hebrew. I guess it really depends who's in charge politically.

When they were the ruling class, they were also a minority. The Manchu script is beautiful... I think the language should be revived too.Hope the people are willing to do that.

Can you recognise this character? 商Nope, it's not shāng. It is a 囧 with a hat which 囧ed its chin off!囧囧囧囧囧囧囧囧囧!

True, but that may be an impediment to the language's success. The script is difficult to typeset, due to it's nature (vertical, left to right). I think that if they really wanted to revive the language they should adopt a modified Latin or Cyrillic alphabet, like with Mongolian.

Sobekhotep wrote:The script is difficult to typeset, due to it's nature (vertical, left to right).

Why would that make it difficult to typeset? Vertical, right-to-left was once the most common way of printing Chinese. I still come across books laid out that way, in fact. What would be so challenging about reversing the direction of the columns?

By the way, the current version of Internet Explorer already supports vertical displaying. It's in fact one of the few things that Internet Explorer can do better than Firefox. I already can assure you it does when I saw a blog about Phags-Pa months ago with the examples properly coded vertically for the font.